The environment in Ashes of Creation is a visually stunning realm, with fantastical beasts and creations designed to both inspire awe and instill fear. The world is harsh and unforgiving, presenting a clear and present danger to the players. Dungeons, demons and dragons, oh MY!

Ashes of Creation's unique and adaptive AI means that an encounter with similar creatures will yield a completely different experience to adapt to as a player. Keeping you on your toes for constantly changing responses from your adversary. The world awaits its heroes.

Exploration

Will be Fog of war, you’ll have a map but you’ll have to discover areas. [3]

Regions

Special Areas

Phoenix Initiative

The Phoenix Initiative reward is an exclusive game instance in which certain players can enter. Think of it as a secret club, where you can socialize with other members. This area will not offer any “Pay to Win” functionality, it will simply offer what the world does in a more personal space. This is an area devs and GMs will often hang out there in their off time, and gives you a chance to interact with them in game!

Dungeons will be unlocked by the progression of nearby nodes, not all servers will have the same dungeons unlocked at one time. What ancient loot will you be able to find?

There are specific mechanics and boss skills that the players need to learn and react to with skill and knowledge to complete the boss, preventing them being zerged through. Zerging is not considered experiencing the content [9]

Bring as large of a zerg as you want, if they do not know mechanics they will be wiped

Raid composition will matter

Dungeon Videos

Disclaimer:These abilities are just a part of a prebuilt kit that was shown at PAX 2017

FAQs

How will you make instanced raiding competitive compared to games like WoW?[10][11][12]

Jeffrey: Competitive? You mean would I rather play an AoC raid or a WoW raid? I mean a lot of that stuff just has to do with how fun you make it. We’d love to compete with WoW on that stage, we have designers that have made raids like that before. It’s certainly a target of ours to crush them.

Steven: I think one of the design elements that we’re implementing into our raids is that the raid will not be exactly the same every single time. Your going to have variables that can’t necessarily be preplanned out. You can preplan out for a lot of the raid like how many dps/healers/support do you need and where will they be positioned. But I think the compelling aspect of Ashes raiding will be the difficulty in achieving this content and having that content change form session to session as well. We want there to be variables that get manifested by what type of node got developed elsewhere. Is he going to have acolytes or cultists, what kit will the boss have, what available skills will he have, what mood is he in? Those are all in the backend of a raid, that you won’t see into the backend, but a lot of those systems are influenced by world development. The raid takes into account to what stage has the world developed. Are there 2 metropolises available in the world? Well let's activate this skill and this skill now. You have 5 metropolises? Then all of the skills have been activated.

Jeffrey: Are they all Economic Metropolises? Are they all Military Metropolises? We can change things based on that stuff.

Steven: It really is a threat assessment from the environment against the players. Whenever you have a player versus environment setting you don’t want a stagnant, overly repetitive environment because it’s lackluster because it doesn’t engage you.

Jeffrey: It goes from being fun to being work

Steven: That’s a good analogy, it becomes a chore, “I have to do this”. A lot of people are thinking, “yeah, but I enjoy getting online with my friends, and being a part of that raid” That’s still going to be the focus and the component of it, except now it’s going to be challenging enough that you have to pay attention and come prepared and be ready to experience a new thing.

Jeffrey: The hope is that when we get to that point, there will be no such thing as the phrase “We have it on farm”

Steven: I know every single large guild raider is like “But I like having things on farm” Well if you want to have it on farm, it’s going to be very difficult.